


When I Fell, You Pulled Me Through

by aimmyarrowshigh



Category: Union J (Band)
Genre: Demon!AU, Demons, Gen, Kid Fic, Kid!Fic, Ritz crackers, horns and tails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-23
Updated: 2013-04-23
Packaged: 2017-12-09 07:05:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/771407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aimmyarrowshigh/pseuds/aimmyarrowshigh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>George's horns looked sharper when his hair was wet flat against his head.  When Jaymi touched them, George purred and his tail flicked high over their heads.</i> Four-year-old Jaymi finds a little demon and brings him home one day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I Fell, You Pulled Me Through

001.  
When Jaymi was four years old, trudging with great determination back up the hill home from a very successful battle of good versus evil in Josh’s back garden, the little red wagon he pulled behind him grew, quite suddenly, much heavier.

Jaymi turned to look, and his thumb fell from his mouth.

There, curled up in the little red wagon, was a boy. Jaymi thought he must be a boy, anyway, because he didn’t quite look to be a girl. He had huge eyes, brown and red and slit like a cat’s, and a tuft of brown hair that looked very soft. It reminded Jaymi of the mess-hewn but mild-mannered old tabby at his Gran’s, and he reached slowly to pat the boy’s head.

The boy purred with the rough, fearsome sound of a lorry on fire.

Jaymi’s fingertips bumped into the nubbins of horns, spiraled like seashells. The boy’s long, thin tail barbed with a black spade swished pleasantly over his shoulder.

“Hi,” said Jaymi. He fished a dusty Ritz cracker out of the pocket of his coveralls and handed it to the boy. “We should find you some underoos.”

The boy yawned, showing off his sharptiny kitten teeth, and promptly fell asleep. Jaymi held the reins of his little red wagon in both hands and tugged, slaloming the boy home.

Behind him, adults and siren engines covered the street like moss, all marveling and shouting at the great yawning maw with asphalt teeth and smoking brimstone breath that had opened in the middle of the road.

002.  
Jaymi decided to call his boy ‘George,’ because he reminded Jaymi of the monkey from the cartoons and always got into trouble.

Mum never seemed to question George’s arrival. She set a plate out for George beside Jaymi’s at every meal and kissed George’s forehead when she tucked them both in at night. George never stayed in bed long; he preferred to curl up beneath Jaymi’s bed with towels and rags and trinkets nicked from around the house. His tail’s barb clicked and clacked against the floorboards all night long, and it comforted Jaymi that if a monster tried to creep under his bed, it would have to get through George first.

George seemed mostly to like Mum, save when she insisted that he needed a bath and George would growl and hiss and climb the walls and twice, set the curtains on fire. But Mum always won, tricking him down with the promise of chocolate bars, and she would dunk George, yowing and seething, into the bath beside Jaymi. He’d eaten all of the rubber ducks, but rather liked to share Jaymi’s boats.

003.  
His horns looked sharper when his hair was wet flat against his head. When Jaymi touched them, George purred and his tail flicked high over their heads.

004.  
By the summer, the neverending sinkhole had been cordoned off with yellow police tape, and Josh and JJ and even the big boys in the neighborhood liked to play a secret game of seeing who could get closest to the hole without being burnt.

Once, a big boy called Christopher tossed a fivepence into the hole and they all watched it fall and fall and fall.

Jaymi’s boy blew smoke from his nostrils and yowled, angry, his spade-tail flashing and dancing in the wet summer heat. 

It pricked Christopher’s ankle before Jaymi petted his boy’s hair and said, “Stop that,” and gave George a Ritz cracker.

005.  
 _“It was a black widow,” said Mrs. Contostavlos, who lived next door to Miss Scherzinger, whose husbands had all disappeared. It had to be a black widow, because Christopher’s eyelids swelled._

_“It was a brown recluse,” said Mr. Barlow, who lived across the way from Mr. Walsh, who hadn’t been seen since before even the big boys were born. It had to be a brown recluse, because his ankle turned black and green._

_“Must have been a hell of a snake,” said Mr. Cowell, and he was a doctor and the watch captain. It had to be a snake, because his heart failed on the third day._

“Very bad George,” said Jaymi, and tapped George hard on the nose.

George giggled. Jaymi gave him a Ritz cracker.

006.  
The other children didn’t give Jaymi a hard time about George. He wasn’t any odder, really, than JJ, who always wore a cowboy hat and boots. Jaymi was excited to bring George with him to school, because George wouldn’t talk and if he could learn to write, it would be much easier to know whether George’s nostrils were smoking because he was thirsty or just wanted to watch telly.

They were playing inside on a rainy day when Jaymi got out his doctor’s kit and said, “George, sit very still and open your mouth.”

George sat still except for his tail, always moving, always flicking, keeping watch, and opened his mouth. His teeth sparkled. He liked to eat tubes of toothpaste. 

Jaymi tapped George’s nose and said, “No biting,” and pressed George’s tongue down with an orangewood stick.

He peered into George’s throat to see why George couldn’t talk. It wasn’t dark down there like Josh’s mouth, which smelt perpetually of vitamins, or JJ’s.

“You have a fire inside you!” Jaymi gasped, appreciatively. “Is it warm?”

George’s jaws snapped shut and he whistled through his nose, blowing little smoke rings. His cat-eyes gleamed at Jaymi, and he held out his hand for a cracker.

007.  
On their first day of school, Jaymi held George’s hand all through the corridors. His backpack was green, and George’s was red, like his favorite boots. Mum had given them each money for milk—although George never drank milk, he liked to eat coins—and packed them sandwiches and apples for snack time. George always ate Jaymi’s cores.

School was very big and quite scary, and Jaymi was very glad for the comforting little furnace of George’s belly beside him. The schoolmaster walked all of the Reception students to their classroom, and he studied George a little too closely where he clung to Jaymi’s hand. George growled and snapped his teeth, and Jaymi whispered, “Be good.”

Their teacher wasn’t scary, though. Miss Henderson was pretty, with long hair and sparkly fingernails, and she helped Jaymi take off his backpack by his cubby.

“This is George,” Jaymi introduced. “He isn’t on your register, but he goes everywhere with me.”

Miss Henderson smiled indulgently at Jaymi. She knelt down to give the same sweet smile to George, and George smiled back, teeth dripping a bit. “Where are you from, George?”

008.  
“But he is from hell!” Jaymi shouted, buffeted along by their irate schoolmaster. “I weren’t swearing, I swear! He is from hell! He is!”

009.  
Walking home from school, just after leaving Josh and JJ at the top of their hill, George and Jaymi stopped near the yellow tape to peer into the hole. Jaymi didn’t like to go by it, but George did, slipping under the warning signs to lie on his belly right at the edge, his face over the gray lips of the earthen mouth so he could growl and scream into the pit. 

Sometimes – today – the great pit screamed back.

010.  
Jaymi stood behind the tape and watched as George reached down into the pit and the smoke from the pit reached up, twined around George’s little pudgy hand, caressed George’s cheek. George’s eyes closed and he sniffed at the sulfur. He purred like a lorry on fire.

It made Jaymi feel sad. And he wasn’t sure why. He watched George’s tail flick, flick, flick from the safety of the ground up, up, up over the abyss of the pit.

“George,” he called. “We have to go home. Mum will have chocolates.”

011.  
The smoke ruffled George’s hair, heat blistering his horns to make them shine. But George pushed himself up and away from the pit. He brushed his hands and knees clean and crossed back to Jaymi’s side of the tape.

012.  
Mum gave them chocolate chip cookies and Jaymi drank George’s milk, as George did not like milk, and when Mum wasn’t looking, George ate a spoon from the sink, crunchcrunchcrunching it up in his sharp little teeth.

That night, Jaymi could hear George humming quietly under the bed as his tail skittered. A song with four notes at once, a whole orchestra hidden in George’s throat, with instruments like nails and bones and the dead but sweet, a chiming twang like a violin buttering over the top. It was scary, like a lot of things about George probably should have been. But he was George, and the song paused, and Jaymi could hear him nibbling at a stolen Ritz cracker.

After his cracker, George started humming again, and Jaymi rolled over. He thought he knew the tune now. It was simple enough. When the moon was high, George didn’t stop even when Jaymi tentatively started humming back.

013.  
They went to school. JJ was older and didn’t share their class, but Josh did. Sometimes he stole George’s blocks and Jaymi had to tap George on the nose and say, _very bad George_ so George didn’t sting Josh with his tail. He ate all of the class’ apple cores at lunch and was very good at naptime. 

Jaymi wasn’t so good at naptime, their first few weeks of school. He tried bringing in his favorite blanket and he tried bringing in his stuffed toys—the ones George hadn’t eaten the heads off of—but nothing helped. It was creepy, sleeping in school, all of the noises of his classmates around him and the mysterious far-off sounds of the school corridors beyond the door. A cough. A scuffle. The tick-tock, tick-tock of the big clock above the blackboard.

In October, Jaymi gave up all pretense and cuddled up next to George for his nap, dark head rested on the glowing furnace in George’s belly, and he was able to fall asleep listening to the swishing click, click, click of the tip of his tail on the floor.

014.  
They went to school, and they learned, and the days passed, and the leaves shriveled and changed and died. George ate them and purred. Jaymi played in them, and after a few false starts, George did, too; he tumbled into piles of leaves after Josh and Jaymi and JJ. He drank his very first cup of hot chocolate in Josh’s kitchen after, and his tail positively wagged.

Jaymi learnt to read at school, and he took to reading books to George quite proudly as George sniffled in the autumn chill and rain and wet and spent more and more of his time curled up atop the radiator. If George wasn’t listening to Jaymi read him _Where the Wild Things Are_ and he wasn’t nibbling at Ritz crackers beneath Jaymi’s bed, George was lying at the edge of the great hole in the middle of the earth, hissing and preening in his strange voice, sounding muffled by the woolen scarf that Mum made him wear after the first time he toddled back inside with the end of his nose pink with cold.

The answers George got now made the whole street shake and quiver with their creaky dull roar. Jaymi watched from the window, peeping over the ledge, and waited. The weather grew colder. The night came earlier. The hole stayed black, but Jaymi could swear that George glowed fire-bright beneath his coat and mittens and winding woolen scarf. 

“Shouldn’t you make him come inside?” Jaymi asked Mum the first night that George stayed out past the time the streetlights lit. “Make him come home.”

“I don’t think I can,” Mum said, and petted Jaymi’s hair. “I think George will go where he wants.”

Jaymi looked up at Mum, but kept his hands pressed to the glass to remind George he was there. “George went in my wagon.”

Mum kissed the top of Jaymi’s head. “I know. Come on, you. It’s bathtime.”

015.  
A little while later, George appeared in the door still wrapped in his woolens, face pink, and let Mum get him in the tub with nary a biting hiss of protest. The water steamed around the cold on George’s nose. Jaymi silently handed George his favorite blue wooden boat, George bowed his head so Jaymi could check George’s horns, just to make sure that he’s still really there. His tail beat a clickety-clack rhythm against the tiles of the bathtub’s wall as Mum soaped both of their hair and wrapped them in fluffy towels. 

George followed Jaymi in padding footsteps down the corridor to their bedroom so close he was almost tripping on Jaymi’s heels. After they were both buttoned into their jammies, George dove under Jaymi’s bed and scritch-scratched and let out a dusty kittensneeze that made Jaymi laugh. When he tumbled out from under the bed with cobwebs and dead spiders in his hair, George giggled back, rough like a rockslide, and handed Jaymi a dusty Ritz cracker.

[](http://statcounter.com/free-web-stats/)


End file.
